Air Currents

There is a corner behind the door in my dining room where all the dust bunnies gather. No matter how many times a week I sweep, still I find them there: inert, fuzzy and gray. It makes wonder over the invisible drifts and currents of air that move through my space at constant. Small eddies and powerful riptides of a wind that must whisper past my messes and children and fast pacing, slippered feet. Whirlpools sparked into action by my passage as I return to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Rapids and churned up turbulence every time Henry runs the length of the main hallway at break-neck speed. And Greyson, down in the dirty mix of it as he crawls from place to place, air and dust and moments swirling around him as he tries to figure out what the world means—as he begins to explore space and place and the ability to move between them. I wonder if we become bipeds, pushing and pulling our weak, chubby baby legs into a standing position, in order to raise our heads above the drifting currents of so many legs passing us by.

As I adjust to this move, I feel much the same. Trying so hard to pull myself to a stand. Cruising from thing to thing, always holding on, unable to support myself entirely. Losing my balance, learning to trust myself again. What would it look like if I could just be brave enough to exist in the turmoil of this moment in my life? To breathe deeply and acknowledge that moving to a new place is hard and stressful and will inevitably send me scrambling to relocate who I am and what everything means.

I swept today. The corner is clean for now. But what dust must still swirl and agitate in the air! It will settle again unto everything—lurking in corners and lingering on surfaces. I heard once that housework is like beading onto a string with no knot. My life feels like this lately, like a constant running to catch up, to be only as far behind as I was the day before. And while I want to make changes, to become something or someone better, I always feel the need to be caught up before I can begin to change. But as of right now, I’m going to approach it differently. I’m going to chip away day by day at what is before me and still try to find time for myself even if I’m not done with my chores. Or else, I fear, I’ll get lost in the mix. There’s going to be dust tomorrow in all the places I dusted today, and there will be more dishes on the counter in the same place I just cleared off, and there will be poop in diapers I’ve just changed, but I’m going to keep going on and I’m also going to find time to pray and to read and to write. And if there’s dust in the corner, if there are dishes on the counter, I’ll live with it. I’m still going to have to change the diapers though…

Jane's Take on Memory...

An excerpt of the musings of Fanny Price from Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen:

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obediant--at others, so bewildered and so weak--and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!--We are to be sure a miracle every way--but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out."